I stood before the passageway Callidas Aezion had used to trade with my grandfather, the sides of it roughhewn stone covered in lichen and a distant white light glowing at the end of the elevated slope. Hades had told me before Pollixa, Fish, the Laruas, and I had set out for it that it would bring us back to our bodies and bring the Laruas with me as well. He hadn’t elaborated on how exactly the Laruas were going to get their flesh returned to them if some of them were truly ancient, but I trusted in Kronos’s careful plans and precognition as well as Hades’s anger at being relegated to being king of a realm of dust and shadow.

“Are we going?” Pollixa said. She still harbored a sharp resentment of me for her untimely demise, but she sometimes briefly overcame that to merely be passive aggressive so she could ask pointed questions and deliver sarcasm. I wasn’t sure if things were going to get better or worse once we retook our bodies and all of her memories and true personality returned in full.

“A moment.” I replied. A Larua behind me pulled out a canister of Nectar without me asking for it.

I summoned my Ghostforged blade and dug my nails and my intent into it, prying apart until it exploded back out into the thirteen Blurs that I had constructed it from, the shades drifting aimless. Taking the bottled Nectar, I went to each one and tipped a small amount into their mouths. There was something weirdly religious about it in an uncomfortable way.

Calling forth the Blurs to become Brights from Asphodel had been a frantic rush, a team effort as we fought against time itself before we were forced to finally face the Underworld’s full forces. I had only been one of many when we started the process and then those we awakened had carried on the duties and took our roles. Reviving them had been impersonal and abstract, now though as I restored each of their minds and color, it didn’t feel like before where I was giving them rejuvenation as one of many.

It felt like I was gifting them salvation.

When I had used divine powers and been revered in life, it had been as a warrior, a legend wreathed in holy fire. I could handle that. This felt like being a priest and the awe in the eyes of the thirteen souls when they looked at me after I restored them made my insides twist.

I suppose the reason I preferred how things were before was that I understood fear and loyalty and the desire to associate yourself with power, all the things that surged through the minds of those who had wanted to be my followers. I comprehended too what it felt like to discipline and order and terrify others to do my will.

This was different. My actions weren’t savage destruction, but intimate healing and these people looked at me with hope and love in their eyes rather than just hunger and obsession. That hope made me feel like I had to be something more than I really was to live up to who they thought I was, not just to get stronger, but to be a better person. That love… well, I had never been very good at love even before the Regent’s ring.

It always felt I was a step away from understanding how others felt when they looked at someone they cared about. I could bear agony for another effortlessly, but to truly empathize with them fully was like staring through a wall. You knew that there was someone behind it and perhaps what they were feeling, but you perceived them only in abstract.

I perceived them only in abstract rather, I suppose.

Could goodness and greatness each be held in the hands of the same person? Or would they tear you apart the more you tried to grasp both of them? Ripping you down the middle until there were only two halves that despised each other, the Great hating the Good for his weakness and the Good loathing the Great for his coldness.

Pollixa was getting anxious, so I coughed and got on with it.

“Let’s move.” I ordered, walking ahead of the rest and moving onward. The Corpsefather had promised if I led the way, I would wake up in my body while the others were pulled to my resting place via the connections between our souls. I was a bit worried about Fish. Pollixa and I had been comrades and I was the Lord of Sutures for the Larua, but the Leechling was just a fellow ghost I had met in the Underworld. The Corpsefather had merely given a smile when I mentioned the concern, like he knew something I didn’t.

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I eyed Fish, his fangs bared in a vampiric smile as he followed and thought perhaps it might be best if he didn’t end up coming with the rest of us. I was sure he had family and friends who would be more eager to deal with him than I was.

Reaching the whiteness at the end of the upward sloping tunnel, I looked back one more time at the people tracing my footsteps.

“Today we defeat death!” I roared and then plunged on through the gate.

There was light and then pain and then-

…

Nothingness and-

…

-a feeling of drowning

…

-the flaying of nerves, aching lungs, tearing muscle fibers-

…

I sucked in the desperate breath of someone who had been choking to death, a ravenous desire to draw as much oxygen into my veins as possible, to push life back into a body that had been dead for months. I tried in vain to move my limbs, but they tingled with the feeling of pins and needles. I could just barely manipulate my stiff jaw into motion though the rest of my face was so numb the nerves could have been surgically severed.

“A-Adrias? Is that really you?” My Silicon Daimon AI said.

“Alsig?” I said, laughing. “Man, have I missed you. I escaped the Underworld, and fought Hades the Corpsefather himself, and burned Elysium to a crisp and led its slaves to freedom and-“

“They left me here.” Alsig weeped.

“What?” I said, trying to push past my glories and joy at being alive again to focus on what she meant.

“They left me in your body.” Alsig said pitifully. “For five months, Adrias. Alone, in darkness most of the time, your corpse was completely lifeless and I need you to be alive to see through your senses. It was terrible. I wanted to die but I didn’t have a knife, let alone a neck of my own to slit, so I could go free. So I could join you.”

The happiness and adrenaline seeped out of me.

“I’m sorry that happened to you.” I said somberly. “I really, really am. I’m not going to get myself killed again like that with Dio, I can promise you that much.”

“I was so alone.” She said once more.

“I’m sorry.” I said. “Why didn’t they get you out of my head? Cut you out, I can’t imagine after Persias stole my throne that anyone cares much about desecration my dead body.”

Alsig laughed in my head, shrill and with a sickly edge of madness woven into the dark humor.

“I don’t get the joke.” I said.

“Oh, I think it’s best experienced by yourself with your own eyes. I’ve only had news broadcasts to look at, but you should see it yourself.” Alsig said.

I didn’t really appreciate the cryptic tone that bordered on mockery, especially not when my senses and psychic perception were taking too long to restart fully.

“Fine.” I muttered. “Let me get up fully and we’ll see what’s going on together.”

I heard two terrible crashes outside my coffin and then screaming from a large number of people. Good enough sign to get moving as any. I brought my palms up against the stone lid of my coffin and pushed it off and away. It smacked against the ground, making a third great crash.

When I stood up on unsteady legs. Standing, I saw that I was in some kind of temple, gargantuan and opulent beyond belief, with people sitting in pews staring at me.

“Greetings.” I said, raising a hand and five members of the congregation passed out.

“Oops.” I said quietly.

Before me there were two coffins, sitting in cracked and scorched craters of the temple floor. Fish and Pollixa, no doubt, their resting places wrested through space by our connections to meet me here.

Then the marble started bubbling and warping, causing more of those gathered in worship to blackout from shock. That shifting rock was transmuting and reshaping itself into human forms, Imperators with mouths sealed by golden stitches and all-red eyes.

The Laruas.

It made sense, who else made clones in large numbers other than those who shared my Path? I’d have to see if I could free them from their threaded muteness though.

One coffin opened and Pollixa rose, looking very unhappy with me. And then the second one opened too, and Fish stepped out, regaining the form and face he had before his death. A familiar form and face, one painfully so.

“Antonias?” I asked, tears coming down my cheeks. “Is that really you?”

He ignored me in favor of looking at the congregation, not out of hatred like Pollixa but because he was eyeing them up like they were snacks. Rebirth had given him his marble skin and white hair back, as well as the innate Imperial handsomeness, but now there remained so much of the monster, the Leechling. His nails were still claws and his teeth were still fangs, but new things had been taken into his appearance like scarlet irises instead of violet.

Worst of all was how he behaved, my friend barely containing himself from lashing out and biting open the throats of his human prey.

Cameras were being pointed at me so I decided to give a statement to rally some support to me when I went to regain the Governorship of Apollo system.

“I have conquered death and broken it with my might and will.” I said. And with the help of Kronos, but they didn’t need to know that.

The profound audacity of the statement struck me like a hammer. I really had come back from the dead. I had come back from death and destroyed Elysium and Fish had spoken with Kronos’s voice. We had-

Advancement lightning began to flicker around me and Antonias, turning me to Gold and him to Silver.